Do you wrap yourself up in sweaters while the rest of the world is still walking around in t-shirts? Then you probably have what traditional Asian healers call 'a cold constitution'. In this case supplementation with aronia berries might help you, according to researchers at Kyoto Prefectural University in Japan. And, we dare to add, the same aronia berries will make your slimming supplements more effective.

Aronia

The – not particularly tasty – dried berries of Aronia melanocarpa can be found in health food shops and the 'superfood' shelves in greengrocers. If you know how high aronia's ORAC value is, then you'll understand why. The higher a food's ORAC, the greater its antioxidant effect, in test tubes.

Less cold
The Japanese researchers gave 11 women, all of whom complained of feeling the cold, 150 mg Aronia extract every day for four weeks. The researchers made the extracts themselves, using water and ethanol as bases.

Before and after supplementation the researchers asked the women to score how cold/warm they felt and the stiffness in their limbs. The figure below shows that supplementation reduced feelings of cold in the subjects' hands, feet and hips by a statistically significant amount.

Aronia supplementation also reduced stiffness in the shoulders, but the effect was not statistically significant.

Thermogenesis
The researchers placed the women in a cool room and measured the blood supply that reached the skin and their skin temperature. The figures below show that aronia brought the skin temperature back faster to its original level.

Aronia supplementation increased the concentration of the pep-hormone noradrenalin in the subjects' blood, and the researchers suspect that this explains partly how aronia works. Noradrenalin helps cells generate heat.